“It’s really important that you don’t tell your friends or anyone else.”
“Briggs,” Scout huffs, putting her hands on her hips. “I heard you the first time. Stop being an annoying weirdo.”
This makes Presley snort out a laugh. She takes a step toward Scout, reaching out and taking one of my sister’s hands in hers.
“I think your brother is just trying to protect me, but it would mean the world to me if you kept the secret . . . at least until the end of the summer.”
“You’re here for the whole summer?” Scout asks, her eyes wide.
“That’s when I have to go back to work,” Presley says.
“Can I tell people after you leave?”
This makes Presley smile. “Absolutely.”
“Done,” Scout says. “But . . . could I get like an autograph as proof? I mean, for after you leave. And probably a picture too, so people believe me.”
“Scout,” I chastise.
“I can definitely make that happen,” Presley says.
Scout claps and does a little dance in place. “Everyone is going to freak out.”
“Okay, but they can freak out after she leaves,” I remind her.
“Briggs,” she says, with a roll of her eyes. “You’re so annoying.”
“Yeah, you . . . said that already.” According to Scout, the word is starting to become synonymous with my name.
Scout’s phone beeps, and mine vibrates in my back pocket. It doesn’t take amazing deduction skills to know it’s our mom.
“We need to go home for dinner,” Scout says, looking at her phone and then at me.
“Yeah, okay,” I say, nodding my head at her and then at Presley.
“Oh! Presley should come with us,” Scout says, practically jumping in place now.
“I’m not sure,” I say at the exact same time that Presley says, “Okay.”
“Really?” Scout asks, her focus on Presley like she didn’t even hear my response. “You’ll come to dinner?”
“Scout, you know how Mom is with secrets,” I admonish.
She waves my words away with her hand. “I can handle Mom.”
I look to Presley. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.” A sick feeling swims around in my stomach, thinking about my mom and her inability to keep gossip to herself. I don’t even think she does it maliciously—she just likes to talk and know things.
“Briggs,” Scout says, putting her hands on her hips. “If we tell Mom that Presley needs to keep it a secret, she will.”
“Are you sure?”
“She’s kept lots of secrets from you about me.”
I lower my brow. “What secrets?”
“Never mind,” she singsongs. “You don’t need to know. But she’s also never told me about what went down in Fort Lauderdale and why you’re really back home.”
My face feels instantly heated. I haven’t told Presley why I’m here, and I kind of wanted to keep it that way. There’s a reason I kept directing our conversation back to her on Saturday night.
“Trust me,” Scout says. “Mom won’t say a thing.”
“This is the best pulled pork sandwich I’ve ever had,” Presley declares.
My mom is practically bursting at the seams. Half because Presley James is sitting at her dinner table, and the other half, I’m pretty sure, is because she can’t tell anyone about it.
I’m still skeptical, but Scout seems to be right about our mom. Once we explained the situation, that Presley needed to hide this summer, Marianne McMannus swore herself to secrecy, promising she’d never say a thing and even offering to tell people Presley isn’t here to try and throw them off the scent. She’ll probably succeed where I clearly failed because people in this town believe her, hence the crowd in the bookshop on Saturday.
She readily and heartily agreed to not tell a soul, and when Presley offered the same deal that she gave Scout—that my mom could tell everyone once summer is over—that pretty much sealed it.
“I’m so glad you like it,” my mom says.
Presley’s eyes widened when we arrived at my mom’s place and, after we got through the hoopla of Presley James really being Presley James, she saw that my mom had made us barbecue for dinner.
“My first summer barbecue,” she’d whispered to me after we sat down at the round table in the dining room of the two-story house we moved into when my mom married Keith. That was sixteen years ago, and a little more than a year later, Scout was born.
I didn’t tell Presley that, like her, I split time in the summer with my dad, who lives on the mainland in Naples. Mostly because it was a different experience for me. I had a slew of friends there and did a lot of summer things. It seemed like rubbing it in her face that we had similar upbringings, and yet mine wasn’t at all like hers.
